Russian newspapers, whose pages of grey type and grey dogma are relieved only by static photographs of stodgy Politburocrats, last week broke out with a real human-interest story and gave it the works. The story they had to tell, already familiar to U.S. newspaper readers, was the saga of four young Russian navymen who had drifted for 49 days across the Pacific in a 60-ft. landing craft, until rescued 1,200 miles north of Wake Island by the U.S. aircraft carrier Kearsarge. In the Soviet telling, the U.S. came off well.
Boiled Bootstraps. Viewed in the terms of the survival manuals,...